Abstract

Assessing and monitoring the performance of computer and communications networks is an important problem for network engineers. There has been a considerable amount of work on tools and techniques for data collection, modeling, and analysis within the network research community. The goal of this paper is to present an overview of the engineering problems and statistical issues, describe recent research developments, and summarize ongoing work and areas for further research. While there are many interesting issues related to network analysis, our focus here is on estimating and monitoring network Quality-of-Service parameters. We discuss methods for estimating edgelevel parameters from end-to-end path-level measurements, an important engineering problem that raises interesting statistical modeling issues. Other topics include network monitoring, network visualization, and discovering network topology. Data from a corporate network are used to illustrate the problems and techniques. As in any overview paper, the discussion is likely to be slanted towards our own research interests.

Citations